


A Minute Will Reverse

by Celandine



Series: Dakin/Irwin [3]
Category: History Boys (2006)
Genre: Drama, Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-27
Updated: 2007-10-27
Packaged: 2017-10-12 02:50:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celandine/pseuds/Celandine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After he's left Cutler's, Irwin thinks back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Minute Will Reverse

From the very first they tried to take the piss. I expected it. A group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys? Faced by a teacher who, I admit, looked scarcely older than themselves? Of course they did. So I threw in the story about the foreskins of Jesus, to show them that I wasn't so different from themselves. That might have been a mistake, too predictable. But I hadn't taught before. I did the best I could.

It took me two or three days to match the names on the essays to the faces. That was precisely the issue that I was there to manage, when I stopped to think about it. The essays they wrote for the entrance examinations needed to be memorable enough that when the interviewers saw a face, heard a name, they would instantly connect it with something memorable from those essays.

I learnt Dakin's name first, unsurprisingly. Well, no, second; Akhtar was first, as he was the only Asian. The name on the essay unmistakably went with that face. No chance of misidentification. So Dakin would have been second. He challenged me, always, with that devil-may-care attitude, the self-assured gaze, and I pushed back as hard as I dared.

He had plenty to be cocky about, mind you. His essays and Posner's were noticeably above the rest, just as Rudge's was a bit below, though still very good, whatever the headmaster thought. But Posner was too much like myself at that age; I didn't want to recognise him. Dakin, on the other hand, was who I'd always wanted to be.

I've no idea why he made his proposition. No. That's not true. He'd seen me looking at him, I'm sure, though I did my best to conceal it. But the cheek of him, asking if I'd like to suck his cock. I did, oh, of course I did. I'd gone home at the end of every day and wanked, imagining him, but that was where it should have stayed, in my imagination.

If I believed in God or karma or any of those things I might have thought that the accident on Hector's motorbike was retribution and warning rolled into one. I was prevented from acting on my impulses and implicitly admonished not to give in to them again. But I don't believe those things. The accident was only that, an accident.

Perhaps there was a certain irony to it, given that Dakin had written an essay on turning points in history. If I were a novelist writing about myself I might have put that in as a bit of foreshadowing, but life isn't so tidy as all that. I found myself hopelessly attracted to a student, arranged to meet him for what we called "drinks" but both knew was something else, and an accident prevented the engagement. There's nothing mysterious or meaningful in any of that. It's just one fucking thing after another, as Rudge said.  


**Author's Note:**

> The title is from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," ll. 47-8: "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." This is for emiime.


End file.
